Sessions at Interaction12 about user behaviour in The Convention Centre Dublin CCD

Friday 3rd February 2012

Gamification is the process of applying game design elements to non-game contexts in order to drive user engagement, influence behavior and improve the user experience associated with digital products and services. Over the past year, the practice of gamification has exploded, fueled by marketing hype, media curiosity and spirited debate. While much of the discussion has revolved around extrinsic reward mechanisms as a panacea for customer loyalty and engagement, the most important and effective motivational dynamics of games have been left on the table.

In this presentation I’ll cut through the hype and draw from the fundamentals of game psychology, double-tapping into the techniques game designers use to motivate, engage and guide players through a game’s lifecycle. In doing so, I’ll lay out a model for architecting user engagement, directing behavior and satisfying the needs of both users and business alike.

Much of user-experience design borrows from methods that assume users have discrete & identifiable goals. However, this assumption can seriously inhibit designing for real human behavior, which (as we will see) often has less to do with rationality than we tend to think.

So your client is excited and wants some of that “persuasive design” juice for his health application. And you did your homework! You read the books and blogs. You got yourself your “Mental Notes” deck and “Design With Intent” toolkit. And as you shuffle through the cards with their abundant patterns and principles to influence behavior – now what? Where to start? Where to focus? What part of the interaction to tackle? Which pattern to choose? And why?

Interest in design for behavior change has been growing rapidly in interaction design in the past years. In part thanks to that, we now have tools and libraries to inspire our designs. What we are lacking are focus and guidance in applying them. Usually, we get those from user research. But current research methods and deliverables arguably do not provide ready springboards.

This presentation introduces the Motivation Ability Opportunity (MAA) Model for consumer behavior, nicked from environmental psychology, as a tool to structure user research around a single behavior to be changed, and to guide subsequent design in prioritizing issues to tackle and choose ways to tackle them.

With practical examples from past client work, the presentation will lay out the model, the research behind it, methods and interview questions to fill it, and how to use it to guide design. Plus you get a handy handout! So the next time your client wants some of that “persuasive design” juice, you'll know “now what” to do.